Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover, and overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy landmark of especial importance, for it is the point whence starts that fine tale, The Mayor of Casterbridge, described in its sub-title as "The Life and Death of a Man of Character." It is a pleasant country of soft riverain features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to this spot shall fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little market-town of Andover, and thenceforward near by the villages which owe their curiously feminine names to their baptismal river, the Anton. There you shall find Abbot's Ann and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann also. Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is a place-although to look at it, you might not suspect so-of hoary antiquity, and its Fair-still famous, and still the largest in England-old enough to be the subject of comment in Piers Plowman's Vision, in the line:
At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.
Alas that such things should be! this old-time six-days' annual market is now reduced to four. It is held between October 10th and 13th, and divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops, Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and Pleasure Fairs. On each of these days the three miles' stretch of road from Andover is thronged with innumerable wayfarers and made unutterably dusty by the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on their way to the Fair ground.
There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair. An umbrella-seller may still, with every recurrent year, be seen selling the most bulgeous and antique umbrellas, some of them almost archaic enough to belong to the days of Jonas Hanway, who introduced the use of such things in the eighteenth century; and unheard-of village industries display their produce to the astonished gaze. Here, for example, you see an exhibit of modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the "W. Choules from Penton" whose name is painted up over his unassuming corner; and although the Londoner has probably never heard of, and certainly never seen, malt-shovels, the making of them is obviously still a living industry.
Greatly to the stranger's surprise, Weyhill, although in fact situated above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to be situated on a hill at all. The road to "Weydon Priors," by which name it figures in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is indeed, as the novelist sufficiently hints, of no very marked features. It is "a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly," and at times other than Fair-time is as quiet a country road-for a high road-as you shall meet; and, except for that one week in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village. There, on a grassy tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of every fifty-two, the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that annually for a brief space do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a human being comes into view. Even now, just as in the beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow: "Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon."
It is on the last day of the old six-days' Fair, in 1829, that the story opens, with a man and woman-the woman carrying a child-walking along this dusty road. That they were man and wife was, according to the novelist's sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a "stale familiarity, like a nimbus." The man was the hay-trusser, Michael Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor of Casterbridge and whose final fall are chronicled in the story. This opening scene is merely in the nature of a prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work, coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to the only bidder, a sailor-the second chapter resuming the march of events eighteen years later.
CHAPTER IV
Table of Contents STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE
Returning to Stockbridge, en route for Salisbury, eight miles more of roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe Corner. In the neighbourhood are "the Wallops," as local parlance refers to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between. It is this last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser, became employed at a "pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . . He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote." Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.
In less than another mile on our westward way the sight of a solitary house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations in the pilgrim's mind-speculations resolved on approach, when the sight of the recently restored picture-sign of the "Pheasant," reared up on its posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims this to be the old coaching inn once famed as "Winterslow Hut." None ever spoke of the inn in those days as the "Pheasant," although that was the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as "Winterslow Hut" it was always known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts of man it would be difficult to find. It was once, appropriately enough, the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person-the self-selected place of exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes its name of "Winterslow Hut") two miles away, lived here from 1819 to 1828. Here he wrote the essays on "Persons one would wish to have seen," and the much less sociable essay, "On Living to One's Self"-an art he practised here to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons with whom he quarrelled. And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the unchanging downs.
Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop into the valley of the Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its slender spire, the tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long before any suspicion of Sarum itself-as the milestones style it-has occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim.
Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look its age. When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum founded, and everything recreated ad hoc at the command of Bishop Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly "American" proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such a method, how very long ago all this was done. This great change of site took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral, remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of the building, in one-the Early English-style, was completed. It was actually a century later that the spire itself was finished.
Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth of its streets. To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit, Salisbury seemed "a very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city." Here we smile superior, although it is true that in his short story, On the Western Circuit, Mr. Hardy presents Melchester, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he should have been. Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair, it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth's programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity. Its character is more truly portrayed in Jude the Obscure, where Sue Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the Close, her cousin Jude follows her. He found it "a quiet and soothing place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment." It was here he obtained work at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration of the cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediæval bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway station: "That's the centre of town life now-the cathedral has had its day!" To his shocked interjection,...
